Don’t part out our national parks

When I worked as a seasonal ranger at Yellowstone
National Park some years ago, I came to believe that magnificent
places like this should remain free from commercial exploitation.
Yellowstone and our other national parks belong to all of us as a
public commons to be protected for future generations. Park rangers
tell visitors to take only photographs and leave only footprints,
and park regulations prohibit the removal of elk antlers, rocks and
even pinecones.

This preservation mandate began with the
Yellowstone Park Act of 1872, but it may be about to change. The
National Park Service has proposed what a federal judge calls
“a dramatic shift in management policy.” Through a
program called commercial bio-prospecting, the door is cracking
open to the commercial exploitation of a wide variety of national
park resources.

Bio-prospecting may conjure up images of
19th century miners with picks and shovels, but it is the large
biotechnology companies that have combed the parks’ natural
features since the early 1990s. They search for unique microscopic
creatures found only in the geyser basins of Yellowstone, or they
inspect the blood of wildlife along with the parks’ plants,
trees, fungi, rocks and soils.

Thanks to the riches of
Yellowstone’s hot pools, one company developed a means for
advanced DNA testing that led to millions of dollars in profits.
This woke up the Park Service, which sought to share in the profits
of any future gold mines. In the mid-1990s, Yellowstone negotiated
a first-of-its-kind cooperative research and development agreement
with a private-sector biotech company. That agreement, however, was
challenged by several nonprofit groups, on the grounds that it
violated federal law by failing to analyze potential environmental
impacts.

Now, the Park Service proposes to expand the
scope of commercial bio-prospecting to all 400-plus units of its
park system, covering 84 million acres, as well as to millions of
acres of wilderness within parks. The agency attempts to end-run
the traditional prohibitions on commercialization by proposing that
when biological samples are “altered” or
“improved” after being removed from a park, they can be
commercially developed. It also proposes to negotiate itself a cut
of the action in the form of a percentage, or royalty payment, on
commercially valuable discoveries.

Commercial
bio-prospecting creates a dangerous precedent because it opens the
door to parting out our parks. Unfortunately, the public and
Congress can’t readily judge the merits of these commercial
deals. Key aspects can be withheld whenever the companies involved
consider the information a proprietary trade secret.

Yet
the Park Service sees only benign environmental impacts to this
commercial exploitation. Important questions remain unasked: Is
commercial bio-prospecting even legal, and is it in the public
interest? I think the answer is no on both counts.
Despite the Park Service’s clever wording in its
environmental impact statement on the issue, the letter and spirit
of the laws creating Yellowstone and the National Park Service
clearly indicate park resources and wildlife are not to be marketed
for commercial profit.

Moreover, commercial research is
qualitatively different from research conducted in the public
interest, with important differences in transparency and access.
Researchers pursuing advanced degrees or those affiliated with
public-research institutions do work that is generally intended to
result in scientific papers submitted to peer-reviewed journals or
for publicly available theses. Their methods and results are
available to the public and other researchers, allowing everyone to
benefit from advances in research methods and techniques, the free
exchange of knowledge and the broadened base of scientific
literature.

Commercial researchers do not as a rule
publish their results in peer-reviewed journals, and the fruits of
their research are effectively trade secrets, not shared.

The solution to this problem is simple: The Park Service should
prohibit research that is expressly commercial. Our parks hold a
lofty place in our spirit and psyche and are not like everywhere
else. Americans have always taken comfort in the knowledge that
national parks are left unimpaired for future generations.
I’d like to believe that some things in this country are not
for sale.

Mike Bader is a natural resource
consultant based in Missoula,
Montana.